Discouragement is the anesthetic the devil uses on a person just before he reaches in and carves out his heart.
Depression
John Eldredge
Envy first brings depression: “My life isn’t as good as yours.” Then comes offense: “Why should you have what I don’t have?” – which degrades into hatred.
Andrew Murray
If any are inclined to despond, because they do not have… patience, let them be of good courage. It is in the course of our feeble and very imperfect waiting that God Himself, by His hidden power, strengthens us and works out in us the patience of the saints, the patience of Christ Himself.
Amy Carmichael
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken.
A. F. Wells
Take Christ out of Christmas, and December becomes the bleakest and most colorless month of the year.
Adrei Bitov
In my twenty-seventh year, while riding the metro in Leningrad (now Petersburg) I was overcome with a despair so great that life seemed to stop at once, preempting the future entirely, let alone any meaning. Suddenly, all by itself, a phrase astonished: ‘Without God life makes no sense.’ Repeating it in astonishment, I rode the phrase up like a moving staircase, got out of the metro and walked into God’s light.
Gilbert Keith G. K. Chesterton
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering but in being weary of joy.
Sarah Young
Self-pity is a slimy, bottomless pit. Once you fall in, you tend to go deeper and deeper into the mire. As you slide down those slippery walls, you are well on your way to depression, and the darkness is profound.
Madame Jeanne Guyon
Never suffer yourself to be subdued by melancholy; it is amongst the things that will most injure you. It is impossible to persevere in the path of holiness, if we give not ourselves to it with joy. The love of God should impart peace to the soul.
Kris Vallotton
It comforts me that Timothy struggled with fear, yet that did not disqualify him from his great call. For some reason, in seasons of intense conflict we often feel as if we are the only ones who have ever gone through such a thing before. We can feel alone, abandoned and isolated. But the truth is that “no temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man” (1 Corinthians 10:13). There is nothing we can experience that others have not gone through already. There is no depth of fear, no intensity of panic, no dark hole of depression and no hold of discouragement